Chaos Program

If I had a bigger brain, how many more languages would I be able to say, “The check is in the mail” in? Wouldn’t it be nice to be smart enough to answer the important questions (some of them may even be more important than that one)?

The nature of people with big brains has been a favorite science fiction theme for many years. I’ve seen it done in an old episode of Outer Limits and a much newer episode of Farscape, for example. In an excerpt from their book Big Brain, published online in Discover magazine’s December offerings (here) Gary Lynch and Richard Granger come up with some interesting thoughts on this question. I’ll say up front, this was interesting enough reading that I bought the book and really hope it’s not completely obsolete by the time I have a chance to read it (Do you think there might be a flaw in my reading strategy?).

According to a blurb about the book on Discover’s website (here) Lynch is a psychiatrist and Granger a cognitive scientist, which seems to mean they are doing a little more than speculating about the subject. The hook they use to get into it is the skulls of a pre-human species of hominid called Boskop (named for the place the skulls were found). Measurements of the skulls indicate that the brains of the Boskop people were roughly 25% larger than those of modern humans. From this, Lynch and Granger calculate an average IQ for Boskop of 150 which is 50% higher than the human average. But according to the excerpt they’re gone, now. Boskop became extinct maybe 10,000 years ago. We did not.

Were Boskop not as smart as the brain size calculation seems to indicate? Or was intelligence not an important thing 10,000 years ago? Hmmm. 10,000 years ago. Isn’t that about the time the last ice age ended? Maybe their brains overheated as the temperature went up. No, that sounds a little far fetched

Anyway, there are serious flaws in calculating intelligence based on brain size alone. The biggest one is that brain size is only one parameter in intelligence. Whales have bigger brains than humans but are not necessarily smarter. The convolutions in the cerebral cortex make a big difference. Roughly speaking, the more complicated the folding of the cortex, the smarter a species will be. This is why humans are (mostly) smarter than whales. [For a decent discussion of brain size see this article at HowStuffWorks.com]

read more »

Maybe it’s some kind of law of nature that immediately after I write a blog post about a subject, the next day there will be new stories related to the same subject. Last week I wrote something about critical thinking and, shortly thereafter, there was an interesting story in Science Daily claiming that tests show that college freshman majoring in science have terrible reasoning skills whether they were educated in the U.S. or in China.

My first reaction was, “Duh!” Young people in general have terrible reasoning skills. That’s why those of us who are older call them idiots. At this point it would be polite of me to explain that I’m just kidding but, in fact, I’m not much. Face it, how many people look back on their younger selves and think, “Wow! I was sure smart then! I wish I was that smart now!”? I have my glasses on and I still can’t see any raised hands. But, believe it or not, this is not intended to trash the thinking capacity of young people. I was trashing a study about them, actually.

The article about the study mentioned that Chinese students knew many more facts than American students (but please don’t get me started on the state of science education in America!) but performed just as poorly on tests of scientific reasoning. That is, even the ones who knew many scientific facts were unable to solve many of the problems they were given.

From this, the researchers (Or maybe it was the reporters. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. But don’t get me started on the state of science journalism in America either!) concluded “that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if they hope to boost students’ reasoning ability.” I found this to be a very poorly reasoned conclusion based, as it was, on the strange assumption that it’s even possible to teach reasoning or that it’s possible to teach it to children. Talk about a triumph of optimism over experience! read more »

There have been some interesting developments in the scientific study of schizophrenia recently. It seems that schizophrenia is an actual physical problem in the brain and scientists are getting closer to understanding it.Along with this comes a better understanding of brain functino as a whole. That makes it interesting. Some recent examples:

Brain Compound ‘Throws Gasoline Onto The Fire’: Schizophrenia isn’t just hearing voices. Schizophrenics have problems in what is known as executive function of the brain. Roughly speaking, this is the ability to judge the current situation and alter your behavior to deal with it. Executive function is several steps above instinctive behavior. It’s one of those things that makes a brain worth having. More information on executive function at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_function. Not being an expert on schizophrenia, I did not know before reading this article that schizophrenics have great difficulty with executive function (also referred to as executive decision making or cognitive flexibility). They can make a plan but, if reality does not conform, they have a very hard time adapting. Their brains can’t process the new information and form new goals or new wrinkles in the plan to compensate. read more »